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Is it unreasonable to say that Johan is just not that good of a developer? I can't recall any project he was lead for that was actually good before someone else fixed it.
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May 25, 2019 19:26
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Beamed posted:No, Stellaris didn't die on release. It's had solid bumps in new/returning players with new patches, sure, but people haven't held off from playing it waiting for one to the magnitude Imperator's player base has. No I mean in it was in a bad state at launch. I don’t give a poo poo about player base, it’s rather meaningless
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May 25, 2019 19:28
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CharlestheHammer posted:No I mean in it was in a bad state at launch. I don’t give a poo poo about player base, it’s rather meaningless Stellaris gets a lot of slack because it was a fundamental rework of Paradox games, not really like any of their previous releases. Sampatrick posted:Is it unreasonable to say that Johan is just not that good of a developer? I can't recall any project he was lead for that was actually good before someone else fixed it. As a developer most people don't really contest Johan's skillset. As a game designer is where the question seems to come up, and I think it's unfair to claim that CK1's design was inherently bad, which was something Johan had to come in to save the day on. CK2 kept the prestige/piety system he designed which works okay. I think people like to use him as a scapegoat because he's consistently been the most visible designer for Paradox games.
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May 25, 2019 19:48
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Sampatrick posted:Is it unreasonable to say that Johan is just not that good of a developer? I can't recall any project he was lead for that was actually good before someone else fixed it. I don't remember all the games he's worked on but he did do HoI2 which was loving stellar. He also wouldn't be in the position he's in in the company if he was actually bad at his job, regardless of seniority. Which isn't to say that Imperator is actually secretely good or whatever, and I think that there's plenty of things to criticise from what we can glean from dev diaries etc. about the design process, but there's no reason to turn that into some kind of witch hunt character assassination thing. It's especially rude when we have the privilege of Johan hopping on the thread, reading our posts, and responding.
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May 25, 2019 19:49
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YF-23 posted:Which isn't to say that Imperator is actually secretely good or whatever, and I think that there's plenty of things to criticise from what we can glean from dev diaries etc. about the design process, but there's no reason to turn that into some kind of witch hunt character assassination thing. It's especially rude when we have the privilege of Johan hopping on the thread, reading our posts, and responding. It's just something that people like to repeat because it's become the Reddit groupthink 
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May 25, 2019 19:49
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Beamed posted:It's just something that people like to repeat because it's become the Reddit groupthink It's also easy and feels good and it sucks rear end.
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May 25, 2019 19:51
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YF-23 posted:I don't remember all the games he's worked on but he did do HoI2 which was loving stellar. He also wouldn't be in the position he's in in the company if he was actually bad at his job, regardless of seniority. Agreed, Imperator has its problems and is in dire need of some TLC from the devs but making this personal and attacking the devs by name (devs who have posted in this very thread) is incredibly poor form.
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May 25, 2019 19:51
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To be honest I think all imperator really needs is that patch to correct. It adds a lot to make the game less barebones which is the second biggest complaint. It doesn’t address the UI which is the biggest complaint but hopefully that gets fixed as well.
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May 25, 2019 19:55
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I mean, HoI2 was released almost 15 years ago and CK1 was released around the same time period. I understand not wanting to come across as rude for fear of scaring off the devs that post in this thread but I think it's a legitimate critique to say that I:R hasn't been the first game that Johan was lead for and which was released with a lot of fairly core design issues.
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May 25, 2019 20:02
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Sampatrick posted:I mean, HoI2 was released almost 15 years ago and CK1 was released around the same time period. I understand not wanting to come across as rude for fear of scaring off the devs that post in this thread but I think it's a legitimate critique to say that I:R hasn't been the first game that Johan was lead for and which was released with a lot of fairly core design issues. You are posting as if you know a lot but aren’t actually sharing any details. I’m assuming it’s because you don’t.
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May 25, 2019 20:05
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Imperator sold better than they expected so saying it's a flop doesn't make much sense.
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May 25, 2019 20:15
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Games as a service has cause some weirdness in how a game's success is measured
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May 25, 2019 20:16
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Beamed posted:As a developer most people don't really contest Johan's skillset. As a game designer is where the question seems to come up, and I think it's unfair to claim that CK1's design was inherently bad, which was something Johan had to come in to save the day on. CK2 kept the prestige/piety system he designed which works okay. I think people like to use him as a scapegoat because he's consistently been the most visible designer for Paradox games. One thing that sets prestige/piety apart from "mana" is that it's usually not a form of currency. You get bonuses for having high prestige and piety, and some actions are locked behind having certain amounts of them, but you usually don't use them to pay for something. You lose half your prestige if you break a truce, but that's a penalty and not a cost. It's different for tribals, but at least the medium term goal is always to cease being tribal, since they're not viable long term.
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May 25, 2019 20:20
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YF-23 posted:It's especially rude when we have the privilege of Johan hopping on the thread, reading our posts, and responding. Not that I actually blame Johan but we shouldn't hold back from criticism just because devs are posting here
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May 25, 2019 20:24
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YF-23 posted:I don't remember all the games he's worked on but he did do HoI2 which was loving stellar. He also wouldn't be in the position he's in in the company if he was actually bad at his job, regardless of seniority. He's just another poster and shouldn't be treated any different actually
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May 25, 2019 20:27
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Torrannor posted:One thing that sets prestige/piety apart from "mana" is that it's usually not a form of currency. You get bonuses for having high prestige and piety, and some actions are locked behind having certain amounts of them, but you usually don't use them to pay for something. You lose half your prestige if you break a truce, but that's a penalty and not a cost. It's different for tribals, but at least the medium term goal is always to cease being tribal, since they're not viable long term. Yeah, which would hopefully be a lesson applied in other instances.
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May 25, 2019 20:32
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Farecoal posted:Not that I actually blame Johan but we shouldn't hold back from criticism just because devs are posting here Agean90 posted:He's just another poster and shouldn't be treated any different actually Nothing to do with what I said. Who are you responding to?
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May 25, 2019 20:40
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Farecoal posted:Not that I actually blame Johan but we shouldn't hold back from criticism just because devs are posting here For the game sure but this is getting oddly personal
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May 25, 2019 20:44
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Is Imperator that bad of a game? It looked alright in the dev diaries. Is it just the setting that's less accessible to players?Party In My Diapee posted:Why care about how many are actually playing when we all still bought the game hoping it will be good. Yeah, it seems like a really weird metric to fret about. It's not like a multiplayer-only game that will go through a collapse if there aren't enough other people playing.
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May 25, 2019 21:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:Is Imperator that bad of a game? It looked alright in the dev diaries. Is it just the setting that's less accessible to players? Yeah, it's pretty bad. Has a ton of UI regressions from previous games, including removing MP chat, and is just not fun once you've done a playthrough. SlothfulCobra posted:Yeah, it seems like a really weird metric to fret about. It's not like a multiplayer-only game that will go through a collapse if there aren't enough other people playing.
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May 25, 2019 21:27
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I'm a huge fan of ancient history and Imperator just doesn't feel like the right game for the era. Or at least for my perception of the era. When I think about the era it's as family driven as the ck period, and the tension between seizing power for your line vs the state. Ultimately my problem isn't the era, it's Imperator. It's not the game I expected but the game we got is also not fun at all.
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May 25, 2019 21:57
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The sad thing is I knew imperator was going to be poo poo but I bought it anyway because I love the time period, and then surprise surprise it turned out to be poo poo 
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May 25, 2019 22:06
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I hope they don't give up on Imperator and work on it for a while because that map is loving gorgeous
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May 25, 2019 22:09
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Imperator is weird because I want to like it but its UI is actively hostile to the player. Everything about it is either hopelessly opaque or infuriatingly tedious. I think the basic structure of the game is ok underneath all that but you have to sit through so much crap to find it.
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May 25, 2019 22:11
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I think a lot of it works quite well and it has some good ideas, but the game does a terrible job of pushing back once you start snowballing (which is weird, that's like paradox's 'thing'), the UI is glaringly deficient, and they should really just go balls in on characters and their interactions. 'Autonomous personalities within your country' is Pdox's best ever idea but for some reason they insist on limiting it to CK, as if individuals were irrelevant to all other periods of history
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May 25, 2019 22:16
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I hope they don’t go to hard on the personalities as I personally find CK kind of boring
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May 25, 2019 22:19
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The UI especially is just mindbogglingly bad in places. It was getting called out all through prerelease basically from its first reveal and it seems like they did very little to tweak it in all that time. Also I think Imperator is especially suffering now* that it's presented against the new Total War game; the devs made a bunch of posts about how they can't make changes x months in advance of release, which made sense when I read it, but now we have 3 Kingdoms with the devs making tweaks and additions right through to the week before launch, and still releasing in a super polished state. *I do feel like the discourse has gotten way more hostile to it just recently; like, I don't think Imperator is a good game, but it's really not as bad as some people are making it out to be, here and in other places. Also I still think the idea that a couple of people keep pushing that a game with a rocky launch can't become good is a really stupid one, especially when talking about Paradox games of all things. Koramei fucked around with this message at 22:47 on May 25, 2019 |
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May 25, 2019 22:26
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I like Imperator a lot and think it's good, but the UI is definitely its most glaring flaw, that and missing QoL features that were added later in EU4's development. I'm confident both will be addressed in the first couple patches, and several patches + DLCs in this will be one of their greatest games, in my opinion. I also seem to be in the minority that I generally like the game and think its negative reception is overblown and out of proportion for what the game is (decent and fun but with definite room for improvement). That said, I personally loved EU4 and never really got into CK2. It seems that people who loved CK2 and preferred it over EU4 have a less favorable impression of this game. I think pretty much everyone will agree objectively that the interface is a problem, but as far as the rest of the gameplay goes, it seems some people subjectively like it while others don't care for it. Me, it was pretty much right up my alley, I've been waiting for years for a mix between EU4 and Rome: Total War 1. I was never able to get EU:Rome and Wiz's mod to run without crashing on my computer, only Steam game I've ever refunded.
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May 25, 2019 22:30
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Sampatrick posted:Is it unreasonable to say that Johan is just not that good of a developer? I can't recall any project he was lead for that was actually good before someone else fixed it. EU4 was fantastic at launch.
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May 25, 2019 22:46
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The reason I bounced off Imperator right from the start was that after trying out a few different nations like Rome, Greece, Egypt and a few tribals in various areas I realized that they all play exactly the same. The only thing that differentiates Rome from any other state is that it has some flavor events. Playing as tribals my only goal was to not be a tribal anymore and that's pretty goddamn lousy for a release game with basically two government types.
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May 25, 2019 22:53
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People ITT doing their charts wrong. Every paradox game has a spike at launch and then a post launch slide to the 'norm'. Where Paradox differs from almost all other devs is that the average player count trends upwards over time, not down. Imperator is definitely flat-lining at an order of magnitude fewer players than other titles. Honestly the reason I didn't buy Imperator is because I'm already an expansion behind on Stellaris and HOI4 and wating for sales on those. I wonder how much of the slump is actually Paradox reaching something close to saturation of their current customer base and and their main competitor being themselves.
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May 25, 2019 22:58
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Party In My Diapee posted:Why care about how many are actually playing when we all still bought the game hoping it will be good. Cause if nobody's playing nobody's going to buy any dlc.
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May 25, 2019 23:00
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reignonyourparade posted:Cause if nobody's playing nobody's going to buy any dlc. All that really matters on that front is the purchase, if the DLC flops then you have problems. DLC will bring players back depending on what it is
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May 25, 2019 23:04
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People are a lot less likely to buy DLC for a game they didn't really like than for a game they liked a bunch.
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May 25, 2019 23:44
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Like I said depends what is in it and whether they feel it addresses their complaints
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May 25, 2019 23:49
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Yeah but that will only reach the people still paying attention mostly.
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May 26, 2019 01:04
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TorakFade posted:The announcement of a hefty 1.1 patch right after release (which shows the game was not release ready, imo) stopped many people from playing, I'd wager. Yeah this is me. I bought it and played like an hour but then stopped when I heard a big patch was coming. No point learning the game if lots of stuff is going to change, and I'm not in any rush.
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May 26, 2019 11:24
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I mean, three kingdoms total war is a better map game than Imperator and includes battles so i'm not that interested in anything else right now. Depending on how field of glory empires turns out that's another game i'd rather play. Paradox might need to step up now that they have serious competition. Who was in charge for CK2?
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May 26, 2019 11:39
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Sampatrick posted:Is it unreasonable to say that Johan is just not that good of a developer? I can't recall any project he was lead for that was actually good before someone else fixed it. Eu1, eu2, eu3, eu4, hoi1,2,3, vicky 1,2, ck1, basically every single game we made before ck2 was my designs. Stellaris and CK2 was Doomdark. Eu4, my last expansion where i designed most probably Art of War. Cossacks/el dorado was Wiz. I did do lots in rights of man, but after that I havent touched eu4 much. Ironically.. the pops and politics model in v2 was 100% my design and code. Could just be that i’ve lost touch, and should just stop making games. pdxjohan fucked around with this message at 13:28 on May 26, 2019 |
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May 26, 2019 13:26
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pdxjohan posted:Eu1, eu2, eu3, eu4, hoi1,2,3, vicky 1,2, ck1, basically every single game we made before ck2 was my designs. leave the ancients behind, vicky3 when
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